Ironically enough, complaints from copyright holders are at the base of this unprecedented display of self-censorship. Since Chilling Effects has partnered with Google to publish all takedown notices Google receives, its pages contain hundreds of millions of non-linked URLs to infringing material. Copyright holders are not happy with these pages. Previously, Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars described the activities of the Chilling Effects projects as “repugnant.”

As a result of the increased criticisms Chilling Effects has now decided to hide its content from search engines, making it harder to find.

“Our recent relaunch of the site has brought it a lot more attention, and as a result, we’re currently thinking through ways to better balance making this information available for valuable study, research, and journalism, while still addressing the concerns of people whose information appears in the database.”

This is terrible news for anyone who uses the Chilling Effects site for research. As great as that site is, its internal search engine is frankly unusable. I usually search that site via Google, using the "site" search term to limit results.

If I can't use Google in the future then Chilling Effects will be almost useless for research. It might as well stop posting the DMCA notices for all the good they will do to shine a light on those who misuse the process.

Luckily for us, it now looks like this was a mistake. Wendy Seltzler tweeted yesterday that:

@flohmann that was an implementation mistake. It was never intended to remove the whole domain -- and probably should all be reversed

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Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."